DISQUS

Congratulations on this release!  I'm glad you found some time in your schedule to update this plugin.  I still have to find time to fix some of my own bugs in WPGB :P.

Welcome back to the WordPress world!  Maybe you can have some time to work on our little project? :)

You always say that you don't write well but in fact you do!  Out of this list, Ozh's Admin Drop down and Akismet is definitely a must.

I consider Facebook for people you already know and Twitter for people that you'd like to know. :)  It's a good way to me to keep in touch with my readers.

Darn you guys!

@Kristarella,
That is true. Most of the internet will not work without Apache, PHP, or MySQL.

Personally, I believe that if themes do not make any WordPress function calls, it should not automatically fall under GPL. Unfortunately, I am not a lawyer and, I'm not legally sure :(.

@kristarella
As of now Matt considers all WordPress themes derived works (even if the CSS files and images have nothing to do with WordPress function calls). He says that the way to look at it is, "If you are given a free theme without images or CSS files then would you use it?"

An interesting discussion arises from child themes though. This is because the theme author can make child themes consist of purely CSS files and images. If that's the case, there is really no reason that child themes need to be GPL.

@Jeffro2pt0
I respect that Matt is not planning to legally pursue anybody who is violating WordPress GPL.

An interesting topic that you guys discussed in the WordPress Weekly podcast was Brian Gardner's new GPL themes and paid support/service model. I've email Brian to ask what he considers as service and support. He says that anybody is free to post bugs onto the general forum. Only theme customizing questions and requests are considered as support and should posted at the paid forum. This seems like a viable business model for premium themes, but what about premium plugins? I can't imagine anybody requesting anything from a plugin author than bug fixes and feature requests. What would be a good business model here?

I would really be interested to hear you interview Brian Gardner on your WordPress Weekly show discussing his premium theme support business model. Maybe that would be a possible future show?

@kristarella
Thank you for stopping by and providing your insight!

You are right that the original statement is definitely contradictory. I wasn't aware that GPL allows you to resell GPL'd code for money (thus the update as you said). Sounds like my solution is not viable at all :(. I must strike it out.

Matt Mullenweg uses one rule of thumb to determine if something is a derivative work. The rule is, "If you take WordPress away, will the plugin / theme work?" In most cases they will not. That's why it's a WordPress plugin / theme. A good example of a semi-plugin that is not a derivative of WordPress is sharethis.com. The ShareThis WordPress plugin is derivative work, but the ShareThis widget (javascript you grab from sharethis.com to incorporate into your site) is not derivative work as it can work on any website (not just WordPress).

@Jeffro2pt0

I wasn't aware of Matt's intentions for the WordPress theme repository in the first place. After listening to the various clarifications in your WordPress Weekly podcast, I have a lot more respect for the guy (THANK YOU for coming up with those wonderful questions) and after being aware of his intentions, I truly understand the basis for these theme removals.

I also feel that if the premium theme developers are not happy with the new guidelines, but still want to be re-included into the repository, then they should just make the necessary modifications and contact Matt for re-entry. Matt is such a standup guy. I'm almost certain that he will definitely give them a second chance if they follow the new guidelines.

Great analytical writeup Andrew. I enjoy your "Question five" section as I never thought about the WordPress community in this way before.

When I first started developing WordPress plugins out of my free time, I gave them away for free. As support requests increased, my free time got eaten up so quickly that I started losing sleep to support the plugins. By then I had to choice but to add donation options and backlinks to my site to feel properly compensated. Who knows what will happen if support becomes too heavy of a burden in the future? Maybe I need to start a members-only forum that lets me attend to paying users' needs before free users.

I guess what I'm saying is that, you're dead-on right about the definition of the community. I feel like I've been adhering to your guidelines naturally without even thinking about it. But as you said, in the real world, nothing stops people from just jumping to reap all the rewards (cost per download, support fees, back links, entry in repository) before they pay their dues.

@Natty
I think it they should work assuming that they are configured properly. Are you trying to chain tunnel or are you just planning to keep on Tor and use putty to SSH into boxes?

The way I see it, there is no need for SSH tunneling if you are already using Tor.

@Michael Garmahis
Good to hear that it's not my bug :). Too bad that Adblock Plus is too smart for my plugin though :(.

@Michael Garmahis,
Sorry you are having issues with the plugin. Let's deal with these as separate issues:

1.

On one blog with Wordpress 2.6 it doesn’t show up

What is the blog you are talking about? Can you enable WP Greet Box and give me the URL so I can check it out?

2.

another with 2.5 give me ‘fatal error’ Parse error: parse error, unexpected $, expecting ‘(’ in ***/wp-greet-box.php on line 717

I'm looking at wp-greet-box.php line 717, but I cannot find any "$" anywhere. Do you have a modified version somehow? My line 717 looks like:

extract(get_option(wpgb::get_name()));

3.

is WP Greet Box compatible with Wordpress 2.7

I and some other people are using WordPress 2.7 right now with WP Greet Box. I haven't seen any bug reports specifically for WP 2.7 yet, so I'm assuming that there is no compatibility issue :).

@Sid
I forgot to comment on your previous statement:

The whole Revolution theme going GPL was very interesting: I think perhaps they looked at the numbers and decided that if we open source it and provide only support etc, we can make more money.

I'm not sure if it was a marketing/sales move though. To me, it seems to me like that is the only thing Brian Gardner can do to be able to fully honor GPL and not start bad blood with Matt Mullenweg/Automattic. (I respect him for doing so!)

I agree. People who code for money have an obligation to deliver their best.

@Sid Savara
Nice to see you dropping by again :). You are right about WordPress repository having the right to do what they want with it (i.e. post only GPL compatible themes that link to the author's website which has *only* GPL themes). The thing that bothers me is that if the author satisfies these requirements, but has any 3rd party advertisements selling premium non-GPL themes, then the author's GPL theme will also get removed from the repository.

It seems to me that advertisements should not count. On the other hand, if we really want to stick to the true spirit of GPL, then we shouldn't take money from those advertisers in the first place. It's a tough decision.

Thanks. I will have a go at those two.

What kind of tracking do you use to find out if your search visitors are staying longer? Just Google Analytics?

@Eduardo Arcos,
Looks like it's a site specific htaccess path issue. Let me resolve this with you through email so we don't expose any directory paths to the public.

Thank you for doing such a good write up about my plugin Sarah! I couldn't have done it better myself!

You can add <?php wp_greet_box ?> to have it show up anywhere in your theme file.

@Farrhad,
Glad to see you are back! Let me know how you like it!

@creativeherb,
Version 4.4.1 should have this feature you are requesting. :)

@Alex,
Thank you for reporting this so that I can make a quick fix for everybody else. Version 4.4.1 should fix this issue.